Some artists have to be shamed into speaking out about current atrocities. Deafheaven can’t stop themselves.
“It’s a very easy thing to acknowledge,” frontman George Clarke says of the wars happening around the globe. “I think if anything, speaking it plainly makes everyone understand how devastating the casual nature of it is to begin with. It should be spoken of casually because it’s very much happening. I guess denying the truth will eat you alive at some point.”
The metal band captures the current era in their new EP, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, a surprise release out today. The album follows their 2025 LP Lonely People with Power, which also deals with tyrants and war-mongers. Still, the EP is meant to stand on its own. “There’s a bit of thematic continuation, but these EPs are also at the same time side quests,” Clarke says. “It’s very much its own thing. The idea of power and warfare and all that kind of thing is just more of a continued interest of mine and the band collectively.”
The band began thinking about releasing an EP last year. Their first thought was to create a heavier offering than Lonely People, which I called “a mixing and merging of melody and metal, pain and poetry” in my Rolling Stone review. Recorded at Glenwood Studios (where a K-pop band was apparently in the next room), the band made what they describe as their first-ever album produced by a true metalhead: Arthur Rizk, who’s worked with acts like King Diamond, Cro-Mags, and Blood Incantation.
The EP takes its title from Robert Del Tredici’s 1987 photo book about the people involved in the production of nuclear weapons. “I found the book in the library in Echo Park, and was immediately drawn to it,” Clarke says. “It was work that was made in the 1980s, but still feels appropriate today, that idea that catastrophe is often built from a mundane series of details that you don’t really realize is connected to an eventual undoing.”
The band sought to capture that unease sonically as well. “I think we all wanted to make a nasty thing,” says guitarist Kerry McCoy. “It’s our first thing since our demo that has anything detuned on it. I think we all wanted to kind of stretch our muscles a little bit and get kind of dissonant. Every release is a timestamp of where we are, a time capsule or something of where we are at creatively, and I think this shows where we’re at creatively now.”
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It all kicks off with the bombastically brutal “Hunter,” which Clarke says “is probably the most intense that I’ve sounded. The song itself is about your undoing. When I write lyrics, it’s a lot of talking into a mirror, and so it addresses a ‘you,’ but a ‘you’ actually tends to be me as well. Have I acted in a way that’s destroyed something? Now that that is destroyed, I can reflect on the things that brought it to that point.” The band also made a short film for the song, directed by Nico Poalillo.
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Deafheaven in New York, September 2026.
Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
The doomy “Three Princes” follows. McCoy says they wrote it after the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran. “I thought one of the most nightmarish things you could do would be to soundtrack the brain to the AI that did this monstrous thing,” he says. “It’s this static-y, nasty thing that ends with a funeral bell.”
The 12-minute epic “Sorry Laid the Hearth” carries us into the future, when all the destruction has been done, and we’re left in the ashes — à la that iconic Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” which the band references often in the studio. “It basically just hammers home the whole idea of you’re here now and you’re stuck here,” Clarke says. “All you have is reflection.”